Eli5 : Why is biodiversity important ?
In: Biology
Biodiversity and quality of air, water and soil go hand in hand. Imagine you have just 1 type of tree, animal and microbes. They can live from eachother until the point the environment has received too much waste from all 3. The one cant use the excretion products of the other, their soil gets satturated and our simple ecosystem will collapse under its own toxic excretions.
An ecosystem with thousands of different kind of species can buffer itself because each species produces/acquires different things. Over history there has been created a complex system with room for many many niches. Humans were born out of this established system. Once we start destroying the diversity (monoculture) conditions arent buffered, niches/habitats dissapear, biodiversity goes down and the quality of life nosedives.
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